


my roots are the same

by ayebydan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-08 03:23:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21228977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayebydan/pseuds/ayebydan
Summary: Living together at number twelve reminds both Sirius and Remus why everything they had before will never work before and yet why they want it to. It reminds them of the journeys they have taken as humans and how their destinations are different. It reminds them that their lives are not their own and they never, ever, will be.





	my roots are the same

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the mods for their patience. My apologies to my team for my tardiness and point loss. I found this very enjoyable despite my battle against wifi woes ect towards the end of the writing period. 
> 
> team destination:  
prompt; “I'm like a tree. My leaves might change color, but my roots are the same.”  
-Rose Namajunas

“I'm like a tree. My leaves might change color, but my roots are the same.”  
-Rose Namajunas

Living with Sirius after so many years is tense at the best of times and uncomfortable the rest of it. Remus does not know where to begin. Sirius began a boy destined for a house and an ideology and a future Remus could never be part of only to shake it off. Or so it appeared. And then it didn't. Now they are here. Sirius is slowly being dragged in by the darkness of this house and his family and everything he so desperately wanted to escape from as a child. Remus does not how to pull him back from it all; to save him. It was always James who did that. Even Peter. Never Remus. 

In many ways, looking back, Remus was just _there_. He was a catalyst for the greatness his friends would become but never quite the greatness himself. How can he tell Sirius how to cope being alone when he has never been able to do that himself? He knows how to live in the Muggle world because of his mother and during the later eighties and nineties a man like Remus could have been self employed and decided his own working pattern around the moon and the pain. He never did. Maybe he felt he never deserved to do more than merely survive from transformation to transformation with his pack fragmented around him. 

If anyone has seen how Sirius is badly adjusting to being confined to a home it is Remus. His was the first Sirius was forced into after all. It had taken time to get the stories from the older man and they came in dribs and drabs over cooling cups of tea and the odd firewhiskey. It boils down to a simple fact that Remus is coming to relate to more and more while trying to make friends with the wolves; under open stars there is a chance to run. 

Beyond that it alarms Remus that Sirius cares little for himself but has a microscopic focus on his godson, Harry. _Harry_. The very boy Remus himself spent years trying to forget because it was simply too painful to remember. 

Sirius has changed and yet he remains the same. When he digs his heels in about something; when he begins to quietly obsess about something then it is always the same. 

Nothing can stand in his way. Though Sirius may have appeared to change over time in many ways those who know him best know that his true self remains the same, his roots as grounded as ever, his sense of being unyielding. It is part of his makeup and always has been. It is the delicate truth of his inner strength. It is the do in the cell that never wavered. It is the destination and the setting off point of the man's whole sorry tale. 

And Remus doesn't know where he belongs in that. He doesn't know that any of them do. 

Sirius has always been like an aged oak in the distance. Alone, battered, yet undeniably a _force_. 

________________________________________

Living with Remus after so many years is tense at the best of times and uncomfortable the rest of it. Sirius often feels like Remus has been on a journey of life that Sirius has simply not taken. Where Remus is heading into his thirties with a level head and experiences under his belt Sirius still feels like an adolescent. He had not made a fabulous adult at twenty-two when the cell door had been slammed. A career as an Auror came as much of a shock to Sirius as it did everyone around him. 

Perhaps it isn't the Remus situation that is the problem but rather how it is forced upon them. After his escape and that horrendous year where he hardly slept thinking Harry might be murdered any moment he made a conscious decision _not_ to seek out his former lover. He instead moved from just a away enough island to just remote enough town to protect his godson until he is forced back into the periphery of the school itself. Remus lived on the edge of society; no one would have found Sirius there but something just stopped him. It is not the years. It is not the lies or mistrusts or the war. It is experiences they don't share and never will and yet the crushing expectation that it can all be put aside. 

No, it is easier to focus on Harry and really better for him to do that too. It is the job he was left after all. The one thing he can still do right. 

The fundamentals of Remus are the same. He is kind, quick witted and not prone to flares of temper the way the rest of their gang had been and not even when he was a hormone fuelled teenager. Remus is resourceful and observant and patient and far deeper than he ever gets credit for. His interests are still spell damage, politics and international relations even if Sirius does not understand the current specifics. It is not enough. Remus can educate what Sirius does not know but that is not the same as filling the gaps that now expand between them. 

________________________________________

They try. If nothing else they try because everyone else expects it of them and they expect it of themselves. Remus keeps the bedroom beside Sirius but it is mostly for show for the children. That in itself hints at disaster. Remus does not appreciate how Sirius handles Molly's demands that her children do not know but is happy that the shackles of his youth have been dropped in that regard. Shame had haunted Sirius before but that is gone now. He would happily tell Harry and Hermione, whom he points out Molly has no more control over than he does, but defers to Remus that it might lead to secrets between friends. Well, that or a Weasley family not knowing for keeping quiet all brimming with the desire to ask questions and Remus knows that better than anyone. He taught five of them. 

Still, whether the children know or just the adults it does not change the fact that Sirius does not know how to be part of a relationship anymore. He has journeyed backwards in that regard. The defences this house created around him as a boy spring back up when he returns there as a man. He is quick to anger and suspect and doubt. His jealousy runs wild every time Remus is able to leave his new prison. 

Sirius tries to pour the broken pieces of himself into caricatures of a present lover and a capable uncle and sometimes he thinks it works. Yet for each time Harry's eyes beam with delight there are times they are filled with uncertainty and Sirius is eight again and in the same doorway being screamed at that he will never amount to anything. 

"I'm trying Rem," Sirius half-whispers and half-mewls into the dark, the memory of Harry's unsure half smile taunting him out of sleep. "I'm failing them. James wanted-"

"Jamie only ever asked for your best."

"It should be better than this," Sirius whispers, "I promised Harry a home and this is-"

"The happiest I have seen him. Truly. Spend time with him tomorrow. Clean a room just the pair of you. He loves you, Siri."

"I _don't _ just see him as James."

"I know," Remus murmurs. But they both know they are speaking half truths. That has always been their way. That has always been their journey. While one is in Spring the other is in Autumn yet both talk of Summer. Their souls remain rooted in Winter. But they try.


End file.
